How Do Archaeologists Tell a Settlement From a Ritual Complex?
Archaeologists rarely identify a settlement from one object. They combine buildings, hearths, tools, food remains, activity areas, and patterns of rebuilding to understand a site.
Independent reporting on space, archaeology and ancient worlds
Browse Curiosmos
Archaeologists rarely identify a settlement from one object. They combine buildings, hearths, tools, food remains, activity areas, and patterns of rebuilding to understand a site.
A person sits on a leopard in a sculpture found inside a small stone building. What did this unusual pairing mean to the people of Karahantepe?
Heavy slabs still cover a small room inside one of Karahantepe’s most unusual Neolithic buildings. Archaeologists plan to enter it from above during the 2026 excavation season, opening a space that may have remained closed for roughly 12,000 years.
New surveys have detected possible houses beyond Göbekli Tepe’s excavated monuments, while rooms already uncovered contain benches, grinding stones, storage spaces, and vessels. The famous sanctuary is beginning to look like the centre of a lived-in settlement.

Göbekli Tepe sits on a limestone ridge near Şanlıurfa, in the Upper Mesopotamian zone where some of the world’s earliest farming communities would later emerge. Its oldest monumental structures were…

On a limestone ridge in southeastern Turkey, Göbekli Tepe keeps wrecking the old timetable of civilization. Its towering T-shaped pillars rise out of the tenth millennium BC with planning, labor,…

Across Turkey and Malta, prehistoric builders cut animals, signs and human forms into stone centuries and sometimes millennia before writing took hold, leaving a record that can be described but…
Why were ancient cities built on top of each other? Across the Near East, people repeatedly rebuilt on the same ground. At sites such as Aleppo, Çatalhöyük, Tell Brak, and…
For generations, the usual outline of early civilization was simple. People settled down, learned to farm, built villages, and only later found the surplus, labor, and social structure needed for…

High on a windswept hill in southeastern Turkey, archaeologists unearthed something that could change how we understand the origins of civilization. Known as Göbekli Tepe, this site challenges everything we…

Stonehenge still earns its reputation. Its first earthwork enclosure was raised about 5,000 years ago, and the famous sarsen circle belongs to the late Neolithic, around 2500 BC. It sits…
Göbekli Tepe still dominates any conversation about the deep origins of monument building, but another hill in southeastern Turkey has been pressing on that story with growing force. Karahantepe, often…

Göbekli Tepe is a remarkable archaeological site located in southeastern Turkey, near the city of Sanliurfa. This megalithic complex dates back to the Neolithic period, about 11,500 years ago, and…

Of all the truly ancient sites on Earth, most of us who follow archaeology and history are familiar with Göbekli Tepe, an ancient site believed to date back some 12,000…

Located roughly some 50 kilometers from the world-famous site of Göbekli Tepe, in the Şanlıurfa Province in Turkey, lie the remnants of a site called Karhan Tepe. And it has…

Göbekli Tepe, the starting point of civilization and the place considered the world’s first temple, holds many mysteries amidst its megalithic pillars. The ancient site is believed to have been…

There is enough evidence to suggest that Göbekli Tepe was not just an ancient site, but the remnant of a long-lost ancient civilization absent from history.

There are more than one or two ancient creations on the territory of Turkey that amaze scientists and historians alike. The mysterious underground city of Derinkuyu, the fortress on Lake…

More and more convincing evidence found over the last two or three decades proves that humanity is a species with amnesia. Countless discoveries around the globe make us question everything…

As the best-selling author and researcher Graham Hancock explains in his book “Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth’s Lost Civilization”, at the end of the last Ice…

The monument’s solar design is beyond serious doubt, the lunar case is growing sharper, and the wider megalithic story stretching back toward Anatolia helps explain why the old “astronomical computer”…

If you ask anyone which ancient monument impresses him the most, chances are they will say the pyramids. It doesn’t have to be the Great pyramid, but pyramids in general.…

The more we explore our planet, the more mysteries we encounter. Thousands of years ago, countless ancient civilizations called the planet their home. Across nearly all continents, sophisticated cultures arose…

The geometric complexity of Göbekli Tepe, considered by experts the oldest temple in the world, is a wonder to scientists and also a great mystery: how could a Neolithic society…